Sunday
Our image of God creates us—or defeats us. There is an absolute connection between how we see God and how we see ourselves and the universe.
—Richard Rohr
Monday
I offer another relevant metaphor for our time, yet rooted in a forgotten tradition: Christ as Conversation. Imagine how different life would be right now if Christianity could become a place for sacred conversation: a place to explore possibilities and express doubts and disagree and encourage voices on the edges.
—Victoria Loorz
Tuesday
If God is always Mystery, then God is always in some way the unfamiliar, beyond what we’re used to, beyond our comfort zone, beyond what we can explain or understand. Yet, very often we want a God who reflects and even confirms our culture, our biases, our economic, political, and security systems.
—Richard Rohr
Wednesday
In Christ, we see an image of a God who is not armed with lightning bolts but with basin and towel, who spewed not threats but good news for all, who rode not a warhorse but a donkey, weeping in compassion for people who do not know the way of peace.
—Brian McLaren
Thursday
In Blessed Mother’s view, all are lovable; all souls are accepted, all carry a sweetness of heart, are beautiful to the eyes; worthy of consciousness, of being inspired, being helped, being comforted and protected.
—Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Friday
The mystics are those who are let in on this secret mystery of God’s love affair with the soul, each knowing God loves my soul in particular; God loves me uniquely. We are invited into that same mystery.
—Richard Rohr
Week Fifty Practice
I It Am
Author Shannon K. Evans invites us to meditate on this passage from Julian of Norwich:
I it am, the might and the goodness of fatherhood.
I it am, the wisdom and the kindness of motherhood.
I it am, the light and the grace that is all blessed love.
I it am, the Trinity.
I it am, the Unity.
I it am, the high sovereign goodness of all manner of things.
I it am that makes you to love.
I it am that makes you to long.
I it am, the endless fulfilling of all true desires. [1]
Evans writes:
The phrase “I it am” can trip you up. But try to put yourself into a mystical frame of mind and stay with it. When I read this passage, I am reminded of the limitlessness of the divine, the absolute improbability of confining the Holy One to a box of our making…. [Julian’s] revelation was so paradigm shifting that instead of continuing to see God as a being that exists, she could begin to see God as existence itself.
Daring to reimagine God has this effect on us. Like Mary giving her fiat [“let it be done”] and finding her limited view of God blown open, we too are invited to give permission to the Spirit to shake up everything we thought we knew. Are we free to stay within our spiritual comfort zones? Sure. But worship becomes so much more poignant when we unleash the tether we’ve tied around our hearts, flying free into the expansive arms of the holy. [2]
References:
[1] Julian, Revelations of Divine Love 59. See The Writings of Julian of Norwich, ed. Nicholas Watson, Jacqueline Jenkins (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 311.
[2] Shannon K. Evans, Rewilding Motherhood: Your Path to an Empowered Feminine Spirituality (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2021), 162.
Jenna Keiper, Untitled (detail), 2020, photo, New Mexico. Click here to enlarge image. God inhabits the rainbow of our being(s). We are all in God and God is represented in all of us, plant, human, animal, earth, star, light, dark.
